Visual Art > Painting Archives - Page 27 of 28

Adrian Piper

Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.

Margaret Rose Preston

Margaret Preston was a leading painter, printmaker and designer.

Miné Okubo

War internee and artist, Miné Okubo is well known for her representations of daily life and humanity. She is most famous for her drawings depicting Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II.

Rachel Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch still-life painter who specialized in flowers, creating her own style and earning international fame in her lifetime. With a long and successful career that spanned more than 60 years, she became the most well-documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Virginie Bovie

Virginie Bovie was a Belgian painter and arts patron, well-known in her time but later largely forgotten. Current whereabouts are only known for seven of her more than 200 works.

Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married in 1904. They worked as illustrators, Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. The couple travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman and posed as Gottlieb’s sister-in-law. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automne in Paris. Elbe stopped painting after her transition.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb’s model who was late for a sitting. By the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented as Lili, attending various parties and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel, petites femmes fatales with Elbe as model.
Elbe went to Germany in 1930 for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She underwent four operations over two years and her case became a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the Elbe and Gottelieb’s marriage in October 1930 and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe in honor of the Elbe River. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, which made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Elbe’s immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, leading to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery.The US and UK English versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. In 2000, The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe’s life, became an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same title – although critically acclaimed, the film was criticised for casting an English cisgender man (Eddie Redmayne) to play a Danish transgender woman.

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron

Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.

Category Archives: Visual Art > Painting